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0:20
Hello. Hoş geldiniz. I’m Dr. Işılay Gürsu. I’m Dr. Peter Cherry. Welcome to the Heritage Türkiye podcast by the British Institute at Ankara, BIAA. And today we're very happy to have with us Aylin Orbaşlı. And Aylin Orbaşlı is the deputy chair of the British Institute at Ankara and professor of architecture at Oxford Brookes University. Aylin also works internationally as an independent consultant advising on the protection, conservation and management of historic places and sites.
0:54
So, Aylin, welcome. Thank you very much. First question for you then how did you first become interested in heritage preservation and work? Oh, long story. And it goes back quiet away. I grew up in Izmir on the west coast of Turkey, amongst archeological sites. So I think even as a kid, we were visiting all the major sites on a regular basis, and my mother had a copy of George Bean, and we would travel around these sites with
1:21
George Bean and I think so when I came to university to study architecture, I already knew that I was more interested in historic conservation than I was in designing buildings. So I always chose elective subjects on conservation. So it's been there a long time. Because there are not many architects who are interested in archaeology. Right? Not huge, no. And because there is a deficit nowadays and there is a huge demand
1:51
from archeological projects to have more architects on board. You're also interested in heritage management plans, and you are one of the very first people who introduce the heritage plans in Türkiye. Can you talk a little bit about, your experience in preparing site management plans and how it came to life in Turkey? Okay. Again, I think, you know, most architects working on archeological sites in Türkiye and elsewhere
2:18
come there to do the drawings and the planning. But quite soon they get involved in a more spatial, strategic way of organizing the site or designing a dig house, or working out where the paths go. So it's a sort of natural transition, I think, for architects on archeological sites. And I was through my PhD, I was studying heritage management, and particularly in the urban context, but looking at how you managed tourism in historic towns,
2:48
which, again, was a growing issue in Türkiye at that time, places like Antalya were having, seeing the effects of how historic towns were being conserved for tourism. So it was the natural combination of sort of spatial management of visitors and to looking at how that manifested itself on archeological sites. And we're very fortunate that you are here in Ankara at the moment, you're normally based in London and Oxford.
3:18
But another important aspect to that is that you actually first studied architecture at Middle East Technical University. So the question then is, how you think training in architecture in Türkiye how that kind of helped you in developing the heritage management plans that you've been working on? I think it did hugely. Because compared to my experience of being an educator in the School of Architecture for almost 25 years now in England,
3:48
there was a much stronger tradition in Türkiye of archaeology and architecture. And if you look at most archeological excavations, the teams there often go to architecture partners. So where the archaeologists would be from Ankara Üniversitesi, there would often be a fellow or a teammate architect from one of the schools of architecture, whichever one that was. And each group would bring their respective students to sites in the summer.
4:19
So it was embedded. So I think we knew we had those opportunities from very early on, which I wouldn't think my students in Oxford Brookes would, you know, would know that they could work on an archeological excavation, for example. So I think it's much more embedded in the Turkish architecture training. When you were visiting sites in Izmir, with the Book of George Bean, I think, George Bean was not concerned with, the pressure of tourism that's put on these sites.
4:52
Right. So, you're also working in the context of tourism and how it impacts historic places and sites. Can you talk a little bit about how that comes at play? Hugely. And I mean, if you look at the birth of heritage management, whether it's the discipline, whether it's a UNESCO requesting heritage management plans for World Heritage Sites, it all is born out of the origin of it is... that it's about managing visitors.
5:19
So if you look at early publications, it often talks about visitor management. And an early visitor management was like, how can we get them through fast enough or not putting pressure on archeological sites in Türkiye. Ephesus is a, you know, one of the earliest examples where congestion became and remains a major issue, trying to get large crowds, particularly with the cruise ships, busloads, peak times and people moving through Greece experience many of the similar problems.
5:53
So congestion and managing large numbers is always an issue. But I think what we move to with, heritage management was to say it doesn't matter if a site has a lot of visitors or not very many visitors, in fact, they all need management and you all need to anticipate visitors, different forms of visitation, different numbers. But, they all need some form of, heritage management, visitor management in that.
6:25
Can we just dig deeper into what it's involved in making a plan for, a historic site or a heritage site? What sort of questions you're dealing with? How are you formulating those plans? I think, again, the origin of heritage management is that there were disciplinary and there is still is disciplinary silos. So you know, the archaeologists they have you know, they've got their agenda. You know, they're trying to discover something and make sense of something.
6:53
And they've got research questions and they try and respond to those research questions through excavation and so forth. And then you've got people in tourism ministries or tourism departments or tour operators who want to monetize sites and see it as the tourism potential. And, you know, a lot of economy, regional economies in the west of Turkey depend on tourism. I've worked in Jordan quite a bit, and the economy of Petra,
7:27
it's part of the national economy. The money coming into Petra, it's part of the national economy. So the visitor numbers are taken very seriously at very high levels often. But they're not interested in the science. They're not interested in the research questions, same time I come from an architecture conservation background and we see archaeologists as destroying things and want to conserve buildings. And, you know, they want to remove layers.
7:56
Whereas if you're an urban heritage... Or sort of a monument, you want to restore it... You don't want to dismantle it to find out more about it. You you're sort of restoring it. So there are these different disciplinary interests amongst. And I think one discipline we often see is nature conservation, environmentalism, biodiversity, you know, they're often... Archaeological sites are also a huge sense of biodiversity.
8:20
And one thing a heritage management plan can do is bring these different disciplines together to work together. So it creates a framework in which everyone still has disciplinary obligations and roles, but it makes sure that none of these, impinges on the others. So decisions being made regarding archaeology doesn't impact on conservation or nature conservation and so forth. So it's finding a balance. It's negotiating the different interests.
8:54
And to do that in the, sort of most scientific way is through understanding what's the values of the site, the significance of the site. So, ultimately you don't negatively impact on what's really important about the site and what makes it attractive to science, what makes it attractive to visitors, and tourists and so forth. So it's a balancing negotiation exercise really. I was thinking of art of negotiation when you were explaining all this situation.
9:28
Can I ask a little bit more specifically about the sites that you worked at? For instance, you worked at Ani, which is a site at the Armenian-Türkiye border, and Çatalhöyük, which is a site in central Anatolia. So can you maybe give us a little bit of more context into the sites that you worked in? I think my very early career, straight after university, was in western Turkey again with classical sites, Bergama...
9:52
So moving ten years later to sort of the Çatalhöyük context was a big, was a major shift for me because I was suddenly, in much less visited sites, much less visibly impressive sites, and often sites located within quite marginalized communities. And I think that's, the real thing. You're working with very different types of community groups with very different expectations than you would see in Western Turkey.
10:22
And I think what we try to do in both those plans was to really engage with those communities, but also understand, that sort of state of marginalization. And I think, you know, Ani, whatever you do, it's on the edge of a country. You know, you can't get more marginal if you tried, you know, you've got nowhere to go. Your connectivity to the rest of the country, even the nearest city of Kars, is quite... it's distant and quite fragmented.
10:56
So archaeological sites are not going to solve all social problems by a long way. But I think the sort of community interest and connectivity becomes a lot more important at those sites. In the bigger sites where there's a lot of tourism, then most of the, sort of local economy... is sorted itself out. They've had the better tourism, the more entrepreneurial ones have opened shops and, you know, hotels and motels
11:28
and guesthouses and cafes and restaurants, you know, they're benefiting from it anyway. They just say, just keep the site, get the visitors coming in and, you know, Side for example, or Selçuk, you know, they're reaping. The benefits of that tourism boom. So they don't see it. I don't think it's the same sort of environmental, certain sort of context that you have in these smaller sites, more remote sites,
11:57
where there is a link and an attachment to the sites and sort of expectation when outsiders come in. And it doesn't matter if it's an international excavation or a Turkish excavation, someone coming from Ankara to Ani is an outsider, you know that they're as good as a foreigner coming in. And it's sort of these people from the other place, a more powerful place. And what can they bring us? They're coming with, with power.
12:23
And I think those relationships become a lot more important, but also much more difficult to navigate. Yes. I remember visiting Ani, quite a few years ago. It's really an incredible place, actually. How did you get involved with working with Ani? It was all these things happened by accident, but there was a joint UNESCO-UNDP program for Economic and Regional Development and Regional Development facing Anatolia.
12:57
It was a, you know, sentence of a name for the project. But the UNESCO partners had decided with the Ministry, the Department of Antiquities here, to focus on site management plan as a means of, sort of, developing the site, bring it back into the sort of spotlight, and it was sort of very experimental. It was very... and it was part of capacity building both in the Kars region as well as in the department here.
13:28
And interestingly, the pathway led to a UNESCO nomination, which it wasn't on the agenda at that point. At that point, it really was 2010, 2011, was to say, what can we do for this site? You know, there are all these fragmented projects. There's donors come in like, World Monuments Fund, restoring buildings. But what's the overall... you know, is there a strategy? Is there a coherent plan?
13:52
I think in that case, the management plan became the sort of glue that, again, held or pulled all these things together.
14:01
Yeah. I have another thing to say actually. So you've worked a lot... we've talked mostly here about kind of archeological sites in western Turkey or in parts of eastern Anatolia. But you've also worked a lot in on cities. So what lessons can be learned from working in urban spaces that can be transferred to historical, archaeological sites? I think what I'm learning, I mean, being both an architect working in that sort of urban and urban planning realm.
14:29
So I'm very, sort of well aware of what urban planning entails, a master planning, training, and also not just in spatial terms, but also in policy terms and sort of policy means, obviously urban sites are very different in that they have very different ownership patterns. And, you know, if you're working in urban heritage, you saying, Aren't archaeological sites lucky they have a fence around it. They know their border, you know, boundaries. They don't need to worry about land rights
14:59
you know, might be someone's field, but that's sort of the maximum. Whereas it's in a historic town, everyone owns their own property. It's their home. The decisions you're making are directly impacting on people's homes and living environment. I think what we're sort of not looking out sufficiently is that there's actually a convergence of urban and archaeological site and in many places, particularly settlements on the periphery
15:26
or on the edge of an archeological site, are actually a part of that heritage management. You know, these villages that are sort of sitting on the edge of sites, ultimately, as things develop, they are part of the planning. I don't think you can think of Ephesus now without considering what's happening in Selçuk and visitor movements through that wider geography. So you're getting into bigger spatial planning. Going back to Petra, the town of Wadi Musa is at the gate,
15:57
you know, to get into the site, you, every visitor passes through this town. So the planning, the character, the movement of people, where the car parking happens, where the roads happen, where you put green parts, you know, all that is actually part of the heritage management of Petra. So you end up doing some very urban heritage things, even in archaeological heritage context. And I think you can also see the sites as settlements, not in terms of settlement archaeology,
16:28
but in modern day settlements with visitor facilities, car parks, dig houses. You know, they are in themselves mini settlements and they're very spatial and there's a lot of town planning. Urban planning has been around for decades, and there's some really good theories developed around it, but also some really good toolkits. So I think we can borrow more from urban planning toolkits when we're looking at sites
16:58
and how we're, you know, understanding topography, geography, geology in planning sites and where we're putting new interventions in it, how we're moving people around them, and we can learn from those disciplines. And more importantly, I think, from a sort of public archaeology point of view is that, again, there's some really good toolkits and experiences of participatory planning. So, you know, we can adopt those. We can't copy them, there are different realities,
17:28
but there's a lot we can use in terms of methodologies that are actually very effective and tried and tested. Definitely. And you just mentioned Petra and you are currently working in different places all around Middle East. So maybe we can ask, like what kind of parallels you can draw between your more recent experiences in working in these countries and in Türkiye? Are there any similarities or what are the main differences in terms of heritage management practices?
17:58
Yes. I've sort of worked in two different contexts predominantly, one in Jordan with Petra and probably a country that's economically quite a bit behind Türkiye and its conditions and realities and social realities in particular. And then in contrast, Saudi Arabia, where actually there's, you know, a lot of wealth. So you can... any suggestion you make can pretty much be funded,
18:27
which I mean, it's a huge, huge luxury that you can say, I want to fence there, I want a visitor center there. And the money, you know, the money is available. So in that sense it's a luxury. But the issues can be the same. Remote sites. How do you get people there? How do the local communities see visitors? Some want them, some don't want them, some think they want them, but when they get them, they're less sure. And you know, and so a lot of the issues are the same.
19:01
I think in the Middle East the tribal structure is much more evident. And working with that tribal structure is a lot more complex. It's not up to me to do it. It's others in the team who are much closer to that social reality, who undertake those tasks. We've looked at some very.... And I thought Ani was sort of on the edge, but I've now seen a lot more sites, a lot more on the edge. And so I think, in the middle of the desert,
19:31
sort of sites where, you know, literally, you know, in the middle of nowhere and how you animate those, how you both protect them, from looting or any other means. You know, you can't just put fences around the desert. And it also impacts on the amazing landscape settings. So how do you find something that has such a wonderful setting? But if you don't do some form protection, how do you protect,
19:59
rock art that's spread over huge valley systems that are all part of the World Heritage sites? So, I think from a heritage management point of view, it is always about complexity and it's about understanding the complexity of each site, each place and each situation, and finding ways in which to solve that complexity, to create a coherent sort of management plan, for it. But I think another lesson for me from that region is that a realization when I got into the region,
20:34
it's just like how far Türkiye is ahead of the game. And that, you know, we're giving example, you know, when we're talking about best practice, it's like, look at this site and look at, you know, the heritage management legislation in particular is way ahead of many, many countries. And I think particularly in the Middle East, Türkiye is something they can aspire to. You know, if you say, in England, in Stonehenge, we do this.
20:58
It's a pipe dream. It's like, that's England, you know, you have rain, you have green, you have this, you have that, you have, you know, schoolkids who come and you know that there's a whole different cultural infrastructure that's already in place. Whereas when you start giving them examples from Türkiye, it's a lot more, oh yeah, we can... we go there on holiday, we see it. We can do that. They are like us, you know, if they can do it, maybe we can do it.
21:26
So I think, we shouldn't underestimate the sort of value of what's available. You know, what's already happening here and that it can be a sort of best practice for the wider region. And, I mean, the recommendation, obviously, is to keep on the best practice. You know, remain, that example to be made example. That's really interesting to hear actually. I guess that takes me on to another question, which is what challenges therefore do you think,
22:00
there are in Türkiye in terms of kind of cultural heritage and protection or the major challenges anyway? There are huge challenges, as in every... I mean, first, obviously is finance. I mean, a biggest challenge, I think we all know is there's just so much heritage. You know, how... the usual thing, you know, wherever you throw a spade, you find something. It's all important. It's all interesting. But, you know, how do we reach all of it?
22:28
How do we spread very small budgets? I mean, anywhere in the world, culture budget is the thinnest slice, and heritage is a thinner slice in even in that, you know, in the culture budgets after music and arts and everything else. You know, heritage is, is still even the thinnest slice. So funds are always, you know... you can have great ideas, you can have wonderful management plans that tell you to do all sorts of things.
22:56
But if you can't achieve that within the finances and the means available, then it's not possible. So, you know, it's been one of, you know, outside of Saudi Arabia working inside., so you're always looking at solutions that can be funded easily within existing budgets with small tweaks. And rather than saying, when there's a donor funding, you could do this thing, you know, but really, really thinking about the finances of how you can achieve something within,
23:25
within the means that are available in that locality. So I think that's always going to be, a big issue. Obviously awareness... and we've talked about this a lot over the years. You know, how do you get local communities more aware of the heritage, more engaged with it? Local politics and I mean, and that's probably the most difficult to solve. And one that's very dynamic at times, and at other times it's very ingrained in the,
23:58
you know, things that have been happening in a place for hundreds of years. And what we're trying to disrupt is actually patterns that have been established, you know, if you have two villages, two settlements, two tribes near a site, invariably you will find that they are in dispute with one another firm, you know. Centuries old land disputes, you know that those two groups or those two villages have always been, I don't know, arch enemies or there's always a hostility between.
24:30
So you're not going to change that by coming and you know, managing archaeological sites. So the things you have to navigate, I think you've also got to accept that again they have to take place within the existing political, socio political frameworks. And so I think so those are the sort of biggest challenges. You are currently in Ankara because we organized a workshop on public archaeology together with UCL
25:05
at Bilkent University on the 17th and 18th of October. I should probably also mention the date. So we had this two days of intense lectures about public archaeology. How would you say that those discussions have a place in your work? Were they inspirational or were they some parallels? And you also gave a wonderful talk at the beginning of the conference. So I'm asking like an overall assessment of the conference and the public archaeology approaches.
25:34
I think it was an amazing conference, and I think it was really interesting because it... which these things don't always achieve is that it brought people from different geographical contexts, different academic contexts in terms of disciplinary contexts. You know, there was anthropologists speaking, archaeologists, architects, town planners. So they were very different disciplinary perspectives on it.
26:00
But I think there was also a different national perspectives on it, you know, sort of the national psyche. You know, how you view something from an English-Western point of view? And it could be a different, German person is operating inside. They can actually have very different world view on things. But obviously there were a lot of speakers from Turkey and you know, they are very much embedded in the reality of Turkey. So they see things from different perspectives as well.
26:25
And I think particularly for public archaeology, that's really, really important. And I think the more we hear about each other's perspectives, the more we're open we can be to these different viewpoints and these different ways people see things and places and sites. And I think that lies at the heart of public archaeology. If you can't see the other viewpoint, you're not going to be successful.
26:50
I think we should also just say that Işılay was one of the main organizers of that conference. So you know thanks very much for all the organization. But that also brings us on to a question more generally about the BIAA. So obviously you're also here in capacity as deputy chair of the BIAA. So what part do you think the BIAA can play in developing more sustainable heritage protection and development? Well, I think this is our shifting role. The BIAA here in Turkey, in Türkiye.
27:21
And I was brought on to the board, which until that time was mostly archaeologists or political scientists, as the first... quite a number of years ago now, as the first board member who did heritage management, and Işılay was hired around that time in her first position at the Institute, looking at heritage management projects. And I think this was on the back of what we did in Çatalhöyük which was, a British excavation at the time that was, you know, the first management plan.
27:55
And looking at sort of broader heritage management, public archaeology, in a sort of more formal, project sense. So I think the institution started building that capacity at that time. So I think in that sense, it was really important to carry that on. And to show that the role of foreign institutions in Türkiye have other roles beyond just digging holes in the ground and having these big excavations
28:26
and publishing a lot of books of volumes and sort of creating the science, and say that you can't just excavate. You've also got to look after these sites. You've got to think about the bigger picture and sort of lead by doing, I think has been the institute's thing, you know, do the research, do this on the sites. You know, we try all the excavations that are now, have some funding from the BIAA. We try and encourage that.
28:55
They're doing some form of heritage management as part of the package that they're doing public archaeology, we separately fund projects that just look at public archaeology at sites. So it might be sites that have been excavated in the past, but things they're now looking at are other forms of heritage management and public engagement. So again, I think we're building a good track record of, doing that. And I think, the task for us now is to stay abreast with what's happening globally
29:27
and because of our international make up and our links and our networks with other British institutes, other, you know, academic institutions and... and it's sort of quite multidisciplinary board that we can sort of capture what's happening in real time and make sure that, that is brought into Türkiye and that sort of starts getting practiced at sites, including collaboration with our Turkish colleagues here and Turkish sites, yeah. Great. Thank you so much, Aylin.
29:59
It's great to have you on board and also at our podcast. And, I have learned a lot from Aylin over the years. And I want to thank you for your generosity in sharing this knowledge as well, and being with us here today, too. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you very much for the organization of the conference, which was an important ten year milestone after the first major public archaeology conference that the BIAA had organized. Thank you. Thank you very much.
30:25
So, until next time, which is in 3 or 4 weeks. Görüşürüz. Görüşürüz. Thank you.
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